50 Horror Stories From Doctors And Nurses That They Can Never Forget (Trigger Warning)

Nurse, had too many to count the worst ever
1. 2 year old who had been beaten within an inch of their life and dumped by someone who ran away afterwards and provided no info, survived but catastrophic life altering brain injury.
2. 16yo with fatigue studying for exams turns out they had liver cancer that metastasised to bones and lungs, died 3 weeks later terrified during the process.
3. Spontaneous second trimester m*******age in the toilets while I was in there with her.
4. Voluntary assisted dying patient I cared for as a new graduate nurse, looked after them for 6 weeks before they made the call to take the medication.

Man,there are so many.

I work in obgyn and a relatively fresh case is a 35yo mum with 2 kids who was pregnant with her 3rd. She'd had long term reflux and vomiting, had an endoscopy the year before that was normal. When she gets pregnant, the vomiting gets do bad she can't eat anything and she's losing weight.

Initially it is treated as just severe morning sickness...but then someone does a scan and they find a thickening in her top stomach sphincter.

She gets a biopsy, and it's cancer. A rare, aggressive one.

She has to make the choice to have chemo while pregnant and chance extreme preterm birth, after which she will likely die because her prognosis is so poor, leaving her husband with two kids and a third extreme premmie.

She chooses to terminate.

The kicker?

On her scope the year before there had been cancer on a biopsy. Nobody had followed up the results.

I'm not a nurse or Dr but I'm a phlebotomist at a hospital that has a lot of psych floors and the ER is like 75% psych related. D**g o*****ses (intentional s*****e attempts and accidental o*****ses), mental health emergencies, drunk/h**h patients, s*****e attempts, psychotic episodes, self harm, etc. I spend a lot of time on the weekends and on overnight shifts in the ER.

One day a patient came in, he was from an adult group home. He had COPD and tried to take his own life by overdosing on lithium. It completely f****d his neurological system. He was in so much pain but couldn't verbalize it, couldn't stop moving and shaking, was so confused and scared. I was there to draw his blood while his lungs were being suctioned and he was absolutely panicking. Trying to rip it out of his mouth, trying to rip out his IV. He had to be restrained. It was terrifying and heartbreaking to watch.

Had another o******e once that stuck with me for a long time. She was so young and no one knew what she took, she wasn't found right away. A family member had called for a welfare check hours after she took whatever she took. She was awake but couldn't talk despite clearly trying. I was only there for about 20 mins while they worked on her and I waited to get blood work, and then another 10 or 15 shortly after when I came back, and her condition deteriorated rapidly. Bruises started appearing on her all over, her limbs started turning purple. They put a catheter in her and her urine changed from normal to straight blood. It looked like her kidneys or liver was shutting down rapidly. They tried to sedate her but it didn't work. Her body was shaking uncontrollably like she had neurological damage and she kept trying to tell everyone something but couldn't get actual words out, and looked so scared. Her blood was flowing in such a weird way once I got the blood work, I've never seen blood flow like that before.

They had to intubate her without the sedation working and I can only imagine how scary and painful it was for her. The only words she got out clearly was the most pained "oh my god". It gave me nightmares for weeks and I broke down crying on the drive home later that day.

RN here. I worked on an oncology floor and got report on a comfort care patient who was actively dying. On assessment he was showing clear signs of distress, and I was surprised to see he didn’t have a continuous pain pump as most of our comfort care people would have. As I was wrapping the assessment with plans to contact the MD for pain meds, he reached out to me, like for a hug. I only stayed with him briefly because I wanted to get him pain relief asap. I didn’t think d**th was imminent; I thought I’d be caring for him all shift. In the 30 minutes it took me to go find a provider and get orders, this man died all alone. This was over a decade ago and I still wish I had just stayed by his side, given him a hug, and made sure he didn’t die alone.

Lost a lot of patients as a bedside nurse. Many are memorable, but none really haunt me any more. I now work outpatient and recently had someone who was fairly young die because we couldn't get their inhalers or CPAP covered by insurance and they couldn't afford them. That one will stay with me for a while. She didn't have to die.

I’m not a doctor, but I was on the medical emergency team at a local hospital. We responded to codes for already admitted patients. I was performing CPR on an old frail woman. Her heart was not functioning. After a minute or so of compressions she woke up during CPR. I stopped compressing and she would pass out. She had no heart rhythm. I started compressions again and she woke up again. At some point she grabbed my hands and said stop. It shocked me and the doctor. The doctor looked at me and nodded his head. I stepped back and let her die. That was 30 years ago, and I can still see her face. I will never forget her.

I gut came into my ER with an "eye infection." He was a hermit, living under a bridge and was not able to give me a good history. He just said it had been "leaking pus" for a while. I asked him to remove his homemade bandage and he revealed a probable squamous cell cancer. It had eaten all of the soft tissue of the lids. I was looking at the shriveled grape of his deflated globe sitting on the bare, eroded and necrotic bones of his orbit.

A woman who was a quadriplegic from infecting her cervical arteries and trached. Her son had her conserved and he was the one who had say whether she had any procedures/code status. Every day I took care of her she would mouth “let me die” over and over again. The son would tell us she didn’t know what she was saying and so we kept doing invasive procedures, dialysis, and multiple surgeries. It was horrible and I ended up leaving for a desk job because of how bad I felt. I’ll never ever forget the look on her face mouthing those words.

PICU nurse here. Had a kid, 10 yrs old or so, who was properly restrained, but had fallen asleep in the back seat, his neck relaxed and his head tilted forward like kids do when they fall asleep sitting up. The car was t-boned and his head whiplashed in a way that “internally decapitated” him—neck broke, spine severed. EMS got there early enough to intubate him and keep him alive. I had him his second day in the unit when they knew the extent of his injuries. He had no sedation, no pain meds, not a single drip infusing to keep him intubated because he wasn’t going to be able to self-extubate because he was completely paralyzed and without feeling from the base of his skull down. But the kid’s brain was 100% ok. So there’s this kid, intubated, aware, and his eyes communicated how f*****g terrified he was. This is MY biggest fear—to be paralyzed and intubated and 100% aware of everything but unable to move or communicate in any way. He had to blink once for no, twice for yes, but that doesn’t come close to conveying everything he wanted to say, ask, or do.

Not a doctor but a radiation therapist. One of my patients was a 6 year old nonverbal autistic boy with leukemia. He had to be sedated for a procedure and panicked when the anesthesiologist approached him with a needle. After several moments of struggling against her, she was able to sedate him and he slumped over in his wheelchair. His father lifted his limp body from the chair and tearfully carried him to the table, wordlessly crying as he looked at his unconscious son. I will never forget the look of absolute despair and defeat on that man's face. As the little boy looked like he was dead, I just knew that this man was thinking that he might be seeing a heartbreaking preview of the future.

IM/PEDS still in training, 24h in the PICU, about 10pm we get a 5yo patient not seen for 17 minutes by parents found at the bottom of the in ground family pool. The patient was revived but did end up dying days later. Get home next morning and my wife and kids are swimming in the neighbors pool. Too tired and too much for me just broke down. It still bothers me and that was a decade ago. It’s always going to be the dead kids but that is the one that gets me the worst.

Not a doc, but I was a paramedic at the time. The first person I did CPR on was an elderly lady with bad osteoporosis. I broke her sternum free of her rib cage with the first compression. It didn’t make a sound, but I can still feel the gentle crepitus sensation on my hands and arms.

Since become a RN, now a NP. I worked in a Pediatric ICU for many years, including transport. I have so many stories that are common place in EMS and ICUs, but would disturb everyone else.

Like carrying a deceased baby (wrapped in a shroud) to the morgue. Although wrapped in plastic and cold, it was still a baby. I still bounced it in my arms like you would a baby, even though the child had passed.

I’ll stop now and go curl up in the corner and wait for the PTSD to find me….

During my psych rotation in med school we admitted a woman whose family contacted police because they were concerned that she was s******l. There were enough concerning signs that she was a danger to herself that she was involuntarily admitted to the psych hospital.

She was there for three weeks, the whole time denying that she wanted to harm herself. I saw her almost every day while she was there. After three weeks there wasn’t enough medico-legally to keep her involuntarily committed any longer, although her family was still concerned.

Within a few days of being discharged she killed her two young daughters and died by s*****e. I don’t know if hearing that news is the worst I’ve ever felt in my career, but it was the first time I got that gut punch of grief from a patient interaction, so it sticks with me.

I’m an OR nurse. Young woman 20 yo came in with ruptured spleen. She was Jehovah witness and she and her family refused blood products. The surgeon tried so hard to fix her spleen before she ran out of blood. They pumped her so full of normal saline and lactated ringers that eventually the bleeding stopped and it was all just fluid. It was so hard to watch a young woman die before my eyes and know she could’ve been saved. This was 20 years ago. I think about it all the time.

When I was working in the ICU, a woman in her 30s came in after being found down by her kids. Imaging showed a ruptured brain aneurysm which led to an anoxic brain injury. She had no family in the country other than her kids, the oldest being only 11 years old. DHR obviously had to get involved and social worker/hospital chaplain came up to help break the news that their mom would not recover. Hearing those children scream for their mother, not knowing if they would stay together… I think about it often.

Speaking on behalf of my cousin. She's semi-new. She's been doing it for a little over a year as a RN (registered nurse).

She told me this once.

Huge trigger warning. If you're sensitive DONT READ ON.

She was in a children's hospital. Paramedics brought in a baby, about 18 months according to her. The kid, we'll call her Jessica, we'll call my cousin Annie.

Jessica had a crushed skull, torn a**s, huge damage to her vajayjay (privates), severely underweight, severe brain damage and a lot of trauma to her body.

Jessica spent the night in the hospital. She wasn't expected to live much longer because of the damage so they didn't bother with surgery because she would've died on the table.

She died about a few days or a week later, as predicted. She died due to her injuries.

Annie later found out Jessica had been r***d *multiple times*, head hit against the wall multiple times because she wouldn't stop crying, starved and a****d. Her mother didn't care and even joined.

Annie had a 6 month old son at the time. She requested a few days off, which was accepted. She has nightmares about this almost every night. She attends therapy. She never forgot this.

Annie hates talking about this. Therapy has been helping her a lot. She isn't quitting her job because she wants to help people. Her son is now 2 and doing good.

The parents did get a call to CPS. The other kids were taken. The parents are now in jail for a***e, homicide, and a few other charges for all of their kids. They had 3 kids.

The entirety of the COVID ICU experience.

Trauma nurse here. The thing that has been giving me nightmares lately is very final destination. I have a lot of other things burned into my mind but this is fresh. I don't share the really bad stuff, that's locked away in a box and I don't want to dig anything up.

Person was driving their car on the highway. Trailer hitch came through the windshield, contacted the patient's skull, crushing it. Patient lived with a severe TBI.

So basically they were minding their own business and got hit in the face with a hitch at a h**h rate of speed. It crushed in the skull leaving them with bone fragments, meningitis, required plastic surgery. It's bad.

When I was in residency I went down to the ED for a trauma to intubate a guy who had been hit by a car. He was in his early 20s and a motorcyclist who was the victim of a hit and run. He had a severe head injury and came in posturing with an irregular gasping breathing pattern and was bleeding internally somewhere so blood kept sputtering from his mouth every time he exhaled. 


I was at the head of the bed holding his Cspine while they did the initial assessment then we intubated him. Because of where I was, I was covered in blood from his breathing and I can still picture his face vividly. I saw a lot of traumas so that by itself may not have really affected me, but for some reason as I was heading back upstairs from the trauma bay I thought he probably has a Facebook based on his age (this was a few years ago). I found him pretty easily and his profile picture was him with his girlfriend and his family and I realized that none of them probably knew what had happened to him yet. He ended up dying later that night.

Not a doctor but psychotherapist: I had a patient who lost basically his whole family in a few months due to several diseases/accidents that were not connected with each other. His wife, both parents and his daughter all died in less than half a year. In my field I deal with loss and grief often but I've never seen somebody so lost and devastated. There's a certain grade of cruelness in this life that's just not explainable and the simple thought of how fragile everything can be shocked me deeply. What haunted me in a good way is the absurd strength this person had. I often think about him when I have to face negative things in my private life. Him being able to get help and live on often turns things in perspective for me.